June 06, 2013

Document Of The Week: Regulating The Phone Company In Your Home

I recently posted about a searchable archive of about 800 historical phone phreaking documents that I used as research material for Exploding The Phone. Even if you're really into this stuff, that's a lot of documents and it's hard to know where to begin. So as a new feature for this blog I thought I'd start highlighting a new document every week.

Oklahoma's article was significant for a couple of reasons. First, because it explained how to construct a "black box" -- basically, a device that would allow people to call you without their being charged for the call -- in way that made it so simple that anyone could do it. (Check out the beautiful and friendly illustration below, for example. You can click on it to get a slightly larger version.)

The second reason the article was significant was that Pacific Telephone and AT&T forced Ramparts to recall some 90,000 copies of the issue. As Ramparts editors wrote later, "Within a week American Telephone and Telegraph had achieved what the CIA, Pentagon, FBI and other targets of Ramparts’ journalism over the last ten years hadn’t been able to bring about: the nationwide suppression of this magazine."

The black box article wasn't the first time Ramparts had run stories advocating telephone fraud, by the way. A few years earlier it published an article on the San Francisco Mime Troup titled "Ripping Off Ma Bell." It's sort of classic for its over-the-top tone, to say nothing of its 1970-inspired color choices. :-)

You can see the entire black box article here. If you're still not satisfied, here are some links to additional Ramparts-related documents in the archives:

You can also view the complete archive of articles related to Ramparts here.

Comments

This article sparked my first experiments in phone phreaking. I ran across the article in the public library while trying to find a copy of the 1971 Esquire article. The reference librarian told me she had kept it on the shelf, even after the recall order, in the name of freedom of information! I thought that was cool.

I built up the circuit in an old tape cassette box. Unknown to me, my area was just upgraded to a #1 ESS switch, rendering the device quite useless for free calls. It did allow listening on the line without drawing dial tone. This was quite useful, as I heard technicians monitoring my line after a long series of experiments with 2600 Hz generated by the BFO and time station WWV from my shortwave receiver!

Ironically, the first clue I had about the Esquire article was from an article in the "Telebriefs" newsletter that Illinois Bell sent in their monthly bills!